Karyotakis, A.; (2011) On the optimisation of operation and maintenance strategies for offshore wind farms. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis reports on investigations undertaken into the reliability, availability and maintenance of offshore wind farms when considering different maintenance strategies, an understanding of which is fundamental when considering the technical and economical viability of existing and future offshore wind farms. A comprehensive literature review has been undertaken in the areas of offshore wind farm maintenance strategies, offshore wind turbine reliability and accessibility issues, and CO2 emissions associated with maintenance expeditions for offshore wind farms. The limitations and disadvantages of current maintenance practices are identified and a planned intervention maintenance policy is proposed and examined in detail. To help design a planned intervention maintenance policy, the offshore wind farm parameters that affect its technical and economical viability have been identified, which become the foundation for developing computer based models using Monte Carlo simulations to quantify the maintenance practices of the planned intervention maintenance policy. Different scenarios of the proposed solution are investigated to help quantify the technical and economical benefits over the current maintenance practises, in terms of wind farm availability, cumulative energy output, production cost of energy and CO2 emissions. The research on the reliability of offshore wind turbines has shown that the power converter system is a critical item that suffers from high failure rates. This thesis reports upon the investigation of a hot standby redundancy on the wind turbine power converter system. A redundancy model is deployed to simulate the planned intervention maintenance policy for different offshore wind farm case studies in order to establish the effects of the hot standby redundancy on the offshore wind turbine operational performance. The novel contribution of this work is claimed to be in the development of dedicated models for the reliability, availability and maintenance of offshore wind farms, which should lead in establishing a technical and economic benchmark for the parameters affecting offshore wind farms.

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